I learned to play piano on a cardboard keyboard.

Three panels that folded in on themselves, easy to tuck between the books and notebooks I carried back and forth to school, spread out on the table at home when I needed to practice. This is not the voice of nostalgia, just simple reality, the way it was.  Piano lessons were being offered at school, in the mid-1950s. I wanted to learn to play, so we met every week, a group of like-minded music lovers, taking turns sitting at the piano in the auditorium, the real deal, ivory in place of cardboard. If I showed enough interest, maybe I’d get a piano one day.

A good friend of my father’s had a son who was blind. It amazed me to listen to him play, sound and touch rolled into his fingers, nothing he needed to see, except what he pictured in his mind. He was musically gifted. I would practice hard, become good enough. One day, maybe months into my lessons, I came home after school, no expectation that it would be a day different from any other, a snack before homework. Certain surprise moments are indelibly imprinted, this one as vivid in memory as the day it happened, an upright piano, a gift from my grandmother, imposing itself in the living room.  The upright would one day be replaced by a spinette, more compact and richer in sound.  A small plaster bust of Beethoven would sit on the piano, a reminder not only of genius but also of poignancy and the power to imagine. If I could not fathom composing music without actually hearing the notes, all I had to was look over at the statuette.

Practicing scales on the piano in a small Brooklyn apartment takes more courage than one might imagine.  Hard to pretend you’re not being listened to. “Play ‘Pagliacci,’” my mother would call out, by which she meant “Vesti La Giubba,” the heart-wrenching aria about the clown crying inside/laughing on the outside; and this from my father, a regular comedian: “Do you know ‘The Road to Mandalay’? Take it.” Nobody had to ask me to play Chopin, my favorite. And all bets were off re: who’s listening? when my brother began playing drums.

I left the piano behind when I moved out on my own, the apartment I first lived in too small and my distractions too great.  The time would come, and with it the space, a larger studio, when my spinette, unplayed for too long would find its way back to me.  My mother would rather have shipped me the Baldwin baby grand she was forever beating herself up about not buying when the opportunity came her way.  The price, a deal if ever there was one, was no match for her daughter’s resistance to a large piano in a small apartment.

Marriage, a child, another move, it was all too much for the spinette. And yet, irony of ironies, one day I walk into my house, no expectation that it would be a day unlike any other, to find a piano – a Baldwin baby grand, to boot – in the alcove where it was always meant to be.

Sometimes when I would sit down to play, my dog would come over, place her two front paws on the piano bench, lift one to my arm.  What sounds beautiful (to me) is too much for her sensitive ears.  So maybe I don’t play as much as I like to, but I do play. The dog is gone now, yet somehow I still feel her paw on my arm.

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I will occasionally talk myself into doing things far beyond my comfort zone only to panic after I’ve reached the point of no return. This is how I ended up almost thirty feet below the surface of the Caribbean Sea, my lungs full of salty water, wondering how – or if – I was going to get out of this one alive.

I have never had a comfortable relationship with water, and, at some points, I have believed that water was actively trying to kill me. This belief was only strengthened by two disastrous snorkeling attempts in Mexico.

The phrase “scuba diving” had always been enough to strike fear into my heart, but, when my boyfriend suggested a “fun dive” while we were vacationing in Thailand, I agreed. We had been backpacking, having adventures, for several weeks at that point, and I felt invincible. Adrenaline carried me through the dive, and for the first time in my life, I had a truce (albeit an uneasy one) with water.

I had justified the dive as a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, but, less than two years later, my boyfriend suggested we get our open water certification. This seemed reasonable when he suggested it from the safety of our apartment in Brooklyn, but, once we were in a dive shop in Honduras, it hit me: I had just paid a substantial amount of money to engage in a very serious and potentially deadly activity underwater.

In order to get our certification, we had to complete “skills.” Without question, the worst skill was removing the mask completely underwater and then replacing it again. When we had to perform the skill in open water, I hurried through, pulse pounding. I thought I had successfully cleared my mask, but, when I inadvertently inhaled through my nose, my nasal passages were infiltrated by salt water. Surprised, I coughed, spitting out my regulator.

Before I realized what was happening, I had inhaled and filled with lungs with water. Desperately, I gasped for air, but, of course, there was none. In my panic, I couldn’t remember how to find my regulator. This is what it feels like to drown, I thought. I turned toward the surface and prepared to swim for it, knowing it was dangerous to ascend without properly equalizing but not knowing what else to do.

Thankfully, Alex, our instructor, returned my regulator to my mouth and cleared it. Water was still in my mouth and my lungs, but at least I could breathe. Alex led us to the surface, and I ferociously coughed the remainder of water from my lungs.

I knew that if I didn’t complete the dive, we wouldn’t get our certification. Bad weather had disrupted our certification schedule, and we only had that afternoon to complete two dives. I had come so far by this point; I couldn’t leave in failure. We returned to the water to complete the dive, which thankfully had no more skills.

There was one more dive and one more mask removal to complete before we got our certification. I proceeded through as methodically as possible, repeating the steps in my head as a desperate attempt to drown out the voice of panic. After a seeming eternity of exhaling and repeating, Alex tapped me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes. My mask was clear. I had done it. We had completed our certification. We proceeded triumphantly to the surface.

My certification photo is ridiculous – soaking wet, mascara running, wrapped in a beach towel, and grinning the cheesiest smile ever while someone holds a towel behind my head as a make-shift backdrop – but it’s also one of my favorites because it represents the day that I finally conquered my fear of water.